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Articles

16.11.2012

The path to neo-humanity as the foundation of the ideology of the “Evolution 2045” party

HISTORICAL PRE-REQUISITES

Throughout its entire history, humanity has been constantly evolving, facing global crises, step by step creating new forms of culture and moving to new eras, changing types of social organization. In our civilization, these transitions have the nature of revolutionary changes of social organization: the Neolithic revolution, the first spiritual revolution and the industrial revolution.

The Neolithic revolution created a society of a traditional type, reducing humans’ dependence on natural conditions. It is hard to imagine that contemporary civilization could have arisen without the historical transition from a nomadic way of life to a settled one, to crop farming and livestock breeding.

The first spiritual revolution was the period when over an extremely short space of time, great thinkers arose: Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Christ and Mohammed – a radical humanist revolution in the spiritual life of human beings. Civilization gained systems of values and goals that enabled humankind to overcome the “catastrophe of the bronze age”, the potential of which has not been exhausted to this day.

The industrial revolution was a response by human civilization to the evolutionary crisis, which was caused by the development of agricultural technologies and the destruction of ecosystems. Mass epidemics were combatted with the widespread introduction of new technologies, and global social transformation, secular projects of humanism and the Enlightenment.

The industrial revolution and industrial society required the development of science. Humanity began to conquer nature. The global goods market and goods of mass consumption appeared, and a new period of demographic growth began.

With the arrival of technologies, new global problems arose. In the aspiration to solve these problems, modern society is moving to a post-industrial model. The role of information technologies, biotechnologies and nano-technologies has grown drastically. Information corporations have overtaken the major raw-material giants of the planet by their market value.

The reverse side of technologies is the society of mass consumption, which gives rise to the service economy, where the main production resource is the qualification and loyalty of the employee of the corporation, who often rejects an independent spiritual quest, and where the main goal is assembly-line production, and satisfaction of needs.

Modern civilization has nevertheless reached an understanding of the value of human capital, and the creative element of the personality in the development of society. This understanding is reflected in the post-industrial concept of society. It is thought that the USA and several countries of Western Europe have made a transition to a more developed post-industrial model of the economy. But because of the inertia of mass thinking and the indecision of many national leaders, the post-industrial concept of society will not be a panacea for the approaching crises, the pre-requisites for which were laid by the industrial phase of development.

Today, civilization stands on the threshold of a series of global crises – anthropological, economic, political, ecological and genetic. For the first time in history, these are crises of a planetary scale, threatening the environment where human beings live, and their existence as a species.

The current model for the development of society has ceased to provide an adequate response to the challenges of the times.

Scientific and technical progress, which could become one of the factors in overcoming global problems, is not directed towards the fundamental development of civilization in the era of the consumer society. Progress is skillfully simulated by making unimportant changes to already existing developments, and value is added by making investments in brands.

The scientific technologies being developed today are sufficient to expand the human population and acquire new living space, but not sufficient to compensate for the negative consequences of this expansion.

The humanitarian technologies that are widely available are not capable of influencing society and changing the devastating vector of development. Our expansion is not compensated for by fundamental transformations of the individual or the mass consciousness. Human society as a collective mind does not have the meaning or value guidelines required to overcome crises.

Theoretically, human civilization may still await a fundamental leap forward. But as the experience of previous revolutions shows, it will be the result of a severe crisis, which is accompanied by a dramatic reduction in the size of the human population. And in the worst case, humanity may be unable to overcome the polifurcation point of the middle of the century.

Another way for civilization to move to the next level of development is for humanity to develop and pass a new evolutionary strategy as soon as possible. The foundation of this strategy is constant and intensive development, reaching a higher level for controlling reality, towards new ideas, meanings and values, and the creation of a fundamentally new model for the existence of society: spiritual, humanistic, ethical and high-tech.

SPIRITUAL AND BODILY EVOLUTION AS A NEW DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY

The successful realization of the new development strategy requires large-scale transformations from humanity, comparable with not one, but two revolutions of the past: spiritual and scientific and technical.

A spiritual revolution means a wide program for the transformation of the individual and mass consciousness, according to which:

– positive qualities will be brought out: inner purity, beauty, sympathy, love for all living beings, harmony, altruism, the ability to serve the good of society, sacrifice and commitment;

– the creative awareness of the genius will be revealed, along with the resources of development of the personality, stability of emotion and will, initiative, figurative thinking;

– using tested and recommended ancient methods, extrasensory perception will be developed, along with skills of controlling life energy, regulating inner process of the organism using will power, controlling reality by the power of thought.

As our own potential is developed and revealed, our individual consciousness will become complex, flourishing, flexible and playful. Multi-varied and paradoxical, it will inevitably begin to come into conflict with its limited mortal protein-based carrier – the biological body.

Overcoming this conflict will be the main stimulus for a scientific and technical breakthrough. The convergent development of NBICS-technologies open up possibilities for creating self-organizing systems capable of reproducing the functions of life and the mind on non-biological substrates. Over the coming decades, human beings will gain a new, practically immortality carrier of the personality.

This is the path of replacing biological evolution with cybernetic evolution. In these transformations lies the essence of a new strategy of development of society – the strategy of spiritual and bodily evolution, or evolutionary trans-humanism.

Modern science already knows a great deal about the evolution of the cybernetic body. Cybernetic bodies will develop from robotic bodies to bodies made of a cluster of nano-robots, and then to hologram bodies. These transformations will completely change the accustomed infrastructure of human civilization.

In describing the prospects of the future of humanity connected with revealing the potential of individual consciousness, we may rely primarily on ancient spiritual texts, but we expect that there will be a flood of new approaches to studying this in cognitive sciences.

Evolutionary trans-humanism will make it possible to move to a new form of social organization, to a completely new era – neo-humanism, where the great goal will be evolution, the self-improvement of every human and all humanity. All goals and tasks of future society will be set taking into account the evolution of the new cybernetic body of the human, and revealing the potential of the human consciousness.

Pursuing this goal will become the voluntary and conscious choice of everyone. In this society, made up of enthusiasts wishing to serve a great global goal, a super-task, a mega-project, corruption, crime and inter-ethnic conflicts will be unthinkable.

WHAT NEW HUMANITY WILL BE LIKE

Throughout history, the evolution of human society has had the following vectors:

– human beings have moved away from nature, their influence on natural processes has increased, and the ecological niche has expanded and deepened;

– demographic growth, growth of the lifespan of the individual;

– an increase in the internal diversity of society, its complexities and technological power;

– a change in the inner nature of the human being in accordance with the growth of the scale and consequences of their activity;

– an increase in the influence of culture on the historical process;

– an increase in the level of self-organization and integration of society

The realization of the new evolutionary strategy will to a significant degree increase the self-organization of society, and the process will begin of the integration of humanity into a common collective super-mind, a super-being, capable of solving many problems that seem impossible to solve today within a short period.

Neo-humanity will change the bodily nature of the human being, and make them immortal, free, playful, independent of limitations of space and time. These transformations will not restrict the individuality and freedom of each separate person, but on the contrary will ensure maximum creative development and reveal their unlimited potential. This is an adequate response by thinking humanity to the challenges, crises, risks and threats of the new times.

Neo-humanity as an ideology, socio-economic structure and form of civilization will open a fundamentally new era – the cosmic civilization of people of the future. It will provide something that has never existed before and which could not have existed, something which may appear fantastic and incredible today. All history will prove to be merely a process of preparing for an unprecedented leap forward in evolution.

– the ability to unite in a collective gigantic mind, the noosphere, a complex self-organizing free society of progress, evolution and synergism. Values, ideology, the mentality and economy are focused on moving forward, on the growth of the global nature of goals and tasks;

The world will become the way that we plan it to be. For the swift implementation of the necessary transformations, we must bring together as many enthusiasts as possible, linked by a common vision of the future, and ready to serve a great idea. Existing scientific achievements and reserves are sufficient to start putting this plan into practice. The great goal is a new futuristic reality, based on five principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.

The goals and tasks of the transitional period – the 21st century:

– to refocus science completely on the creation of breakthrough technologies (such as for the realization of the “Avatar” project to transfer the personality to an alternative carrier, the main technological project of the third millennium);

– to create conditions for an amalgam of science and spirituality;

– to develop and introduce new energy sources;

– to create new forms of transport (individual portable super-speed means of transport);

– to create eco- and futuropolies with a controllable climate;

– to create underwater, floating and flying cities;

– to develop and introduce weaponry that prevent the possibility of waging war;

– to develop new space technologies, to create pre-requisites for human expansion into outer space;

– to develop trans-humanist medicine based on avatar technologies: technologies of cybernetic artificial organs and systems, technologies for moving the individual mind of the human being to a non-biological substrate – an artificial body;

– to eliminate aging, illnesses and death;

– to make people with restricted abilities become people with additional abilities;

– to nurture people who are spiritual, humane, with aspirations for the future, creative, and with belief in their divine potential;

– to overcome existing global crises and a possible catastrophe of the middle of the century;

– to introduce new organizational technologies for managing society;

– to form a self-organizing human society directed towards further self-improvement according to the principle of blossoming complexity;

– to create conditions for cultural flourishing and the development of every nation, bringing them together under the aegis of evolutionary trans-humanism, in order to transform a citizen of a separate nation into a citizen of Earth;

– to carry out a cultural revolution;

– to ensure a drastic rise in the level of mass education;

– to persuade the international community of the importance of ideas of evolutionary trans-humanism;

– to eliminate crime and any conflicts, including conflicts between ethnic groups and nations;

– to neutralize natural disasters and cataclysms.

The goals and tasks of neo-humanity for the 22nd-23rd centuries:

– to conquer aging and dying universally, for every human being and all of humanity, using technologies for moving the individual to another carrier. To gain unlimited immortality, i.e. to perfect the capabilities of the artificial body in order to realize existence of unlimited length for it (freedom in time);

– to realize free unlimited movement in outer space;

– to give everyone the opportunity to gain multi-corporeality, a mind distributed on many carriers, the free life of one mind in several immortal bodies and control of them;

– to expand the living environment to multi-reality – the ability to live and move freely in several realities at the same time.

The goals and tasks of neo-humanity in the 23rd-30th centuries:

– to realize expansion into outer space – humanity settling in the near and distant cosmos, unlimited freedom of movement in the Universe, liberation from the need to live in just one specific place – on planet Earth (“Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot live in a cradle all one’s life”. K.E. Tsiolkovsky);

– to realize full control of reality by the power of thought and will, the possibility to self-organize, order and complicate space, and by creating complex unequal systems, to make new worlds;

– to create a personal Universe controlled by the mind for every neo-human being;

– to realize control over the course of personal history by the power of thought, going as far as to complete all historical process in a point of singularity (end of history, contraction of time).

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About us

Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.

The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.

The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.

A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.

The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.

An annual congress"The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.

Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society

2015-2020

The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc. Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.

2020-2025

Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.

2030-2035

Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.

2045

This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.

Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.

Key elements of the project in the future

• International social movement • social network immortal.me • charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045) • scientific research centre "Immortality" • business incubator • University of "Immortality" • annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.